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Dec 27 (Reuters) - The world's mobile phone carriers have
failed to implement technology fixes available since 2008 that
would have thwarted the National Security Agency's ability to
eavesdrop on many mobile phone calls, a cyber security expert
says.

Karsten Nohl, chief scientist with Berlin's Security (LSE: SRG.L - news)
Research Labs, told Reuters ahead of a highly anticipated talk
at a conference in Germany that his firm discovered the issue
while reviewing security measures implemented by mobile
operators around the world.

Nohl also told Reuters that the carriers had failed to fully
address vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to clone and
remotely gain control of certain SIM cards. Those
vulnerabilities were pointed out in July.

While the German cryptologist criticized carriers for
failing to implement technology to protect customers from
surveillance as well as fraud, he said he does not think they
did so under pressure from spy agencies.

"I couldn't imagine it is complicity. I think it is
negligence," he said. "I don't want to believe in a worldwide
conspiracy across all worldwide network operators. I think it is
individual laziness and priority on network speed and network
coverage and not security."

A spokeswoman for the GSM Association, which represents
about 800 mobile operators worldwide, said she could not comment
on Nohl's criticism before seeing his presentation on the topic
at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Europe's
biggest annual conference on hacking, security and privacy
issues.

Nohl uncovered the issue while working on a project known as
the GSM Security Map, which evaluates security of mobile
operators around the globe. The map, which can be found at
www.gsmmap.org, is partially funded with a grant from the U.S.
government's Open Technology Fund, according to Nohl.

None of the carriers surveyed had implemented measures for
thwarting a method that allows the NSA to eavesdrop on most
mobile calls by unscrambling a widely used encryption technology
known as A5/1, Nohl said.

The Washington Post reported on Dec. 13 that documents
leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed the agency
can crack A5/1. () Nohl said that method
would have been blocked if carriers had applied two patches
released in 2008.

Nohl is credited with leading research teams that have
uncovered major flaws in mobile technology in recent years.

In July, he reported on security vulnerabilities that would
allow hackers to gain remote control of and clone certain mobile
SIM cards. The unprecedented work prompted a United Nations
group known as the International Telecommunications Union, which
advises nations on cyber security plans, to urge the industry to
take quick action to tackle the vulnerabilities.

Once a hacker copies a SIM, it can be used to make calls and
send text messages impersonating the owner of the phone, said
Nohl, who has a doctorate in computer engineering from the
University of Virginia.

A few weeks after Nohl disclosed his findings, he said it
looked like most carriers had implemented fixes to prevent such
attacks.

Yet he said on Friday that while conducting research for the
GSM Security Map project, he learned on closer inspection that
those fixes still left plenty of room for attacks, making
customers on many networks vulnerable.

"I need to go back on what I said. The majority of the
operators only addressed the symptoms, not the root cause," Nohl
said.

He said that his firm launched the GSM Security Map project
to pressure mobile operators around the world to boost security.

The effort will also push researchers like himself not to be
complacent.

"We as researchers must not give up so easily like we did in
July, when we said 'The network operators addressed it. We are
so proud. We changed the world,'" Nohl said.

The group will continue to update the map, which has
detailed reports for each country surveyed that describe
security of individual carriers.

In the map's initial release on Friday, the country whose
networks were rated the most secure was France.

Not all countries are surveyed, however, because the group
does not yet have enough data.

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